Here’s something that happens to me quite a lot. I map out the structure of a section of the story, with headings, keywords and a synopsis in comments in Ulysses (more detail on how to do that in Writing A Novel with Ulysses, plug, plug). But then when I get down to writing things start to change.
At some stage I’ll reach a scene which I still want but I need more from it. A bit of the original idea and something new. In other words this more than a single scene. Do you need to delete that original empty scene and synopsis and create two new ones? Not at all.
Just select the original scene then drag it holding down the Option key to where you want the extra scene to go in your narrative. You then get a copy of the original scene. Everything’s preserved so you can delete the parts you don’t want, add in new ones, and get to work without having to go through any repetitive reconstruction of the original.
Just a little thing but it saves some tedious drudgery, which leaves more time for the hard stuff: writing.
David Hewson 